The 10 Dishes That Made My Career: Harold Dieterle

The reviews haven’t started rolling in yet for the Marrow, Harold Dieterle’s third restaurant to open in New York’s West Village, but the chef already feels like he’s won one battle with the food critics. Namely, that this time around the preliminary press about the place has measured its success—and Dieterle’s—in relation to his other restaurants, Perilla and Kin Shop, rather than his other claim to fame: winning the first season of Top Chef.

“I want to be a respectable chef, first and foremost,” says Dieterle. “Not that the show takes anything away from that. It’s just that for me, being a restaurateur is more important than being on television.”

This shift in perception—from reality-TV star to seasoned New York chef—is well-deserved, and it’s particularly meaningful as Dieterle tackles such a personal project with the Marrow, where the family tree-style menu pays tribute to his two ancestral cuisines: German, from his father’s side, and Italian, from his mother’s.

But long before he was cooking duck-and-pretzel dumpling soup and sauerbratened lamb ribs, Dieterle got his first taste of kitchen culture while washing dishes after school in his teens. “I was a pretty terrible student student in high school. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I took a Home Ec class to meet girls, and that’s where I found my focus.” From high school, he enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America, back you went there because you wanted to become a chef, not a brand.

For a while after graduation, he stuck to Long Island, where he grew up. “I did my internship on Fire Island and had such a good time there. I could have seen myself easily living there the rest of my life. I was there in shorts and a t-shirt cooking 200 covers a night with a pair of tongs in my hands. “

Eventually, ambition (and some lingering student debt) drove Dieterle to Manhattan, where he hooked up with Jimmy Bradley, owner of the Red Cat and the Harrison. Dieterle worked at the Harrison under Joey Campanaro and Brian Bistrong until in 2004, when he took a life-changing sabbatical to travel through Thailand. Returning in 2005, he decided to answer a Craigslist ad calling for people to compete on an unknown new cooking show, Top Chef. His first place finish changed not just his own career trajectory, but arguably that of the many contestants who followed in his footsteps.

While appreciative of the doors the show has opened for him, Dieterle remains a little ambivalent about its broader effect.

“A lot of the people going on shows these days are doing it to get out of the business—to get a show, to get an endorsement deal, to not have to cook any more. That was never my game plan.”

Here, Harold Dieterle takes us from Bangkok to Babylon (well, West Babylon, Long Island, at least) as he breaks down the dishes that shaped him as a chef.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

1. Duck

This is probably one of my favorite proteins, and it's been the base for some of the more popular dishes at all our restaurants—from the spicy duck meatballs at Perilla, to the duck laab salad at Kin Shop, and now the duck schnitzel at the Marrow. When I opened [the Marrow] I said to myself, I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do a duck dish. I’m not. I’ll do something else. But then, it reels me in. It always reels me in.

My wife’s family has a house down on the Gulf Coast, so I do some pretty serious fishing there every year. Triggerfish is probably my favorite fish for eating—it eats like turbot or Dover sole. It’s pretty amazing stuff. The quinoa and the mushrooms can change out, but the fish and the sauce are always there.

3. Fried Phuket lobster with sweet chili sauce

This is my favorite dish from my visits to Thailand. It was my most luxurious meal at the time, and it was totally worth it. I tried to find it when I went back, and the place wasn’t there anymore. It was kind of a shithole, but the lobster was pristine. It was like a four-pound spiny lobster—close to a hundred bucks, and the size of a small child. It was ridiculous. They took the lobster, chopped it up shell-on, tossed it in some fried garlic and rice flour, deep-fried it, and boom—[it was served] with a little sweet chili sauce on the side. I got some sautéed pea greens just to try to feel healthy. It was very entertaining—people were watching as I was trying to take it down, and I did. It was a long, drawn-out meal, but I took it down. I fell in love with Thai food before then, but this dish raised the bar even higher.

4. Langoustines

The langoustine dish I served at Perilla was kind of an adopted dish, based on my Thai experience as well. There was a shellfish stand in Bangkok, taking river prawns and grilling them, and I wanted to work the wok. There was a very cute girl there, and I wanted to talk to her, but she didn’t understand a word I was saying. Her aunt, or maybe her mother, came over, and I was trying to tell her that I was a cook from New York City, and that I wanted to try to make the garnish for my river prawns. She was saying, “No, no, you’ll get hurt,” so I showed her the burns on my arms, to show I had some battle scars. So she let me, and it was very entertaining. I was working the wok while this young lady was cooking my prawns; I looked up at one point, and there was a very, very long line of people trying to figure out why this white guy was working the wok at this shellfish stand. So, I was cooking, and she was watching what I was doing, and she was adding stuff as I cooked. I kind of based the langoustine dish at Perilla on that sauce—a Phuket black pepper sauce.

5. Blue crab with spaghetti

I love blue crabs—really all types of crabs, but blue crabs are the one I grew up with as a kid on Long Island. We'd catch them on the docks near my home and my mother would cook up a huge pot of crab gravy, or red sauce. The family recipe has always been onions, garlic, fennel seed, fresh red pepper, and tomatoes—at the end you drop in some basil leaves from the garden. It was a favorite of mine then, and it remains a favorite today.

6. Crab and sea urchin ragu at Gramercy Tavern (New York, 1999)

Back when Tom Colicchio was the executive chef at Gramercy Tavern, I visited, and this is one dish I'll never forget. It tasted of the sea but was extremely balanced. Two of my favorite ingredients, crab and uni, together—it was just great. Sea urchin was a little out there then; it wasn’t one of those things you see on everybody’s menu [like you do now].A meal like that made me intimidated to go work in a super serious three-star kitchen. As a young American restaurateur, I think [the greatness of Gramercy Tavern] is what we all strive to achieve.

7. Dry-aged rib-eye

This might be one of the things I'd want to eat as a last meal. Whether it's at Perilla or the Marrow, or at another restaurant I love, [nothing beats] a good dry-aged steak, corn-fed with a great crust on it. There's a real art to making a great steak.

I’m just a sucker for fried chicken. Even bad fried chicken, I still enjoy. The hot fried chicken at Gus’s is pretty sick. It's a game-changing bird and I definitely look at fried chicken in a different way now.

9. Sunchokes

I’m a little obsessed with sunflower, in general. I’ve done dishes based around the whole plant—sunflower seeds, the sprouts, the sunchokes, and even sunflower heads. The sunchoke creamed spinach at Perilla is another of the restaurant’s signature dishes.

I’d never had celtuce before, and it was the first meal I’d had at Stone Barns. So, they bring this very simple dish out, and I remember thinking, what is this shaved celery-looking thing? Oh, some cashew butter. I thought, pretty fucking boring. And then I ate it. Wow.
Now, I do a lot of research looking for new ingredients, but four or five years ago [when I hade this meal] I’d never seen or heard of celtuce. I’ve done a bunch of dishes with it, but nothing has ever been as magical as what I had at Stone Barns. I’ve gotten very spoiled living in New York City—there’s great food everywhere—but that dish remains vivid in my mind. I remember exactly how it tastes.

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